Booking
Prices from $29
Date & Time
Tuesday, 4 February - Tuesday, 4 February 2025
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm AEDT
Location
The Playford Hotel, 120 North Terrace, Adelaide, 4963, SA
Join us in Adelaide on February 4, as historian Simon Heffer and CIS Executive Director Tom Switzer discuss the changing political climate across western liberal democracies.
For more than a decade, progressives shaped Western public discourse and institutionalised what its critics call a woke mentality, with its guilt about Western cultural heritage, its obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion, and its penchant for cancelling unfashionable (conservative, classical liberal) opinions. Around the universities of the English-speaking world, there has been a concerted attempt to portray the British past as one of almost relentless evil. As with all identity politics, the objective was to make the majority feel ashamed of itself.
In recent times, however, a conservative tide is travelling around the western world. The US has caught the wave, as have Italy, Germany and Canada. European centrists are floundering in the face of centre-right and populist right-wing parties. British Labour is sinking in the polls.
How do we account for the changing political climate? Does this rightwards shift suggest that the progressive moment in global politics is over? What does this mean for our understanding of the British imperial project? It entailed much cruelty and what we would now call a disregard of basic human rights. But Australia is a country of which its citizens of all cultures can be intensely proud, and it is the result of that imperial project. Those cultures have learned to be tolerant and respectful of each other within the national democracy.
Simon Heffer, columnist for The Telegraph and professor of modern British history at the University of Buckingham, is the author of High Minds, The Age of Decadence, and his latest book, Scarcely English: An A to Z of Assaults on Our Language (December 2024).
Tom Switzer is Executive Director of CIS. He formerly hosted ABC’s Between the Lines and held editorial roles at The Spectator Australia and The Australian.